The Hen House presents the work of Curtis Bartone with Ugis Berzins opening November 22nd. INKED: Concept to Commodity will be on view at The Hen House’s new space located at The Stables (7 Rathborne Dr.) through December 16th and features a wide variety of original works rooted in drawing, including illustrations, prints and paintings. The show focuses on the evolution of the sketch as the basis for artistic creation, and the relationship of value to a works’ ultimate distribution as it is mediated through different processes.

The comic is for the many, the print for the few, and the painting for the one. How this relationship affects its worth is worth considering. 

Gallery hours are Friday through Sunday from noon-5PM starting on November 22nd. A closing reception will be held on Saturday, December 14th, from 6-9PM. All programming is free and open to the public.

About the Artists: 

Curtis Bartone’s work has been included in over 100 group exhibitions internationally, and in 22 solo exhibitions, most recently at the University of Alabama, Huntsville; Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston; Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia and Alberta Printmakers in Canada. He has been awarded numerous residencies in the U.S. and abroad and has received grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council. In the summer of 2021, Bartone will have a solo exhibition of works on paper in North Karelia, Finland.

He received an MFA from Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, and a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design, in Columbus, Ohio. Currently, he resides in Savannah, Georgia with his wife and seven cats, where he makes paintings, drawings and prints and teaches printmaking at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

@cabartone | curtisbartone.com

Ugis Berzins is an illustrator and cartoonist hailing from Michigan, but is now biscuit deep in the Savannah Gentrification Olympics. After graduating from SCAD in 2014, he decided to double down on making art for a niche audience, opting out of profitability or an upward career trajectory. No matter how questionable the concept, the goal for Ugis is to treat it seriously, with a high degree of craft.

@futurelandfillpress | futurelandfillpress.com

Join us for a night of dark diversions as The Hen House takes over the gallery space at The Stables and presents a group show by The Stables Studio Artists for its opening weekend. Halloween party, costumes required, food and beverages abound!

Live music by: The Tulsa Skull Swingers

Suggested donation at the door: $5

Instagram: @kellymillsart

The Failure Fiber Artist Corporation (F.F.A. Corp) presents its newest member, Gonzalo Hernandez with an exhibition of recent work at The Hen House in Savannah, GA. This artist has been inducted to this organization with the completion of recent works titled, “the almost pattern paintings” and “me as textile”.

This series announces the return of the artist to the medium of painting after years apart. Paradoxically using painting to create works about textiles, these paintings are small-scale recreations of well-known pattern. Houndstooth, Gingham and Burberry all make appearances. These paintings are adequate entries for the F.F.A. Corp. because of their insufficiencies. These paintings are heavily-handled, loose recreations of famous patterns giving these normally rigid designs a characteristic loose and liquid appearance. The labor of the process for these paintings is at once prevalent but insufficient, presenting a recreation but an inaccurate one at that. Yet, the small scale of these works implies that they are samples of these patterns intended to be used as reference making the compilation of them into a swatch book of almost pattern paintings. Normally used as standards for a pattern and design, these almost patterns present a book of standards, but this standard is mediocre at best. However, failure and success are determined by metrics; metrics which can be changed. By setting the standard of “almost”, these paintings are now cornerstones of the new standard. This show is full of failures and that is why it is so successful.

These almost patterns are accompanied by a series of works titled “me as textile”. In these photographs, the artist becomes a part of the textiles he examines by cutting a face-shaped hole in a roughly-stitched patterned cloth. Despite his central appearance in the cloth, the artist is not the subject of the work, rather he is the direct object. The focus of the textile is the repeating pattern across its surface and since the face is the only visible part of the artist’s body within the textile it reduces the artist to only his most recognizable features. The cloth reduces the artist to a pattern. Given the artist’s role as pattern within each of the works in the exhibition, the question arises: is it a successful or failed pattern?

Instagram: @hernandezgonzalo

Instagram: @blamblamblam

A prole’s table cloth

pulled from its dwelling

disassembled by mortars

run up a lamp post

In the silence of ceasefire

without wind

draped dingey white

a dead flag hangs

Exhibition Prospectus: On Being A Man

Being born to a rural community, oversaturated with masculinity, to a patriarch that exemplified its worst traits, facilitated a youth of overwhelming confusion, dysphoria, and dissassociative coping. On the one hand, there is the experience of unmistakable love and care of a mother. On the other, a court ordered visitation, rhetoric to disparage her, propaganda to discredit her, incessant evaluation, cruel critique and unrealistic expectations to “be a man.”

After several years of documenting surrogate examples of similar dynamics within southern culture, this work collates those interactions and utilizes performance, installation and new media as meditation. More specifically, it turns the view from cathartic introspection to the universal concepts of war and patriarchally facilitated violence.

Artist, Eli Matson

Eli Matson was born and raised in rural Georgia where he attended high school and explored painting and woodwork. Upon graduation, he would go to Atlanta to study photography and sculpture. Here, he would explore abstract and conceptual works; as well as political documentary. He would utilize antiquarian printing processes, installation, woodcraft, foundry, and sound. Today he employs sonic art in installation-based works that act as meditations on humanity’s role in global violence. His hope is to continue this work to its own end, exhibit with opportunity and open a residency in the rural Midwest.

Instagram: @eli.matson

Instagram: @monica.ciop.studio, @freshnewbatch

Juror, Eric Clark

Eric Clark is a ceramic artist and professor from Savannah, Georgia; He holds a B.F.A. from Armstrong State University and a M.F.A. from Georgia Southern University. Eric has shown his artwork throughout the United States and England and has received national recognition for his ceramic sculptures from the National Council for the Education of Ceramic Arts. Eric is currently the Assistant Professor of Foundation Arts at Savannah State University.